[Anthony Federico] said he has used the phrase "at least 100 times" in headlines over the years and thought nothing of it when he slapped it on the Lin story.

Federico called Lin one of his heroes - not just because he's a big Knicks fan, but because he feels a kinship with a fellow "outspoken Christian."

Swift move, playing the Christian card. I'm sure the right-wing commentators will now be super-motivated to defend this poor man.

But let me say something cold-hearted: This is what happens when you use clichés. George Orwell told you long ago — in "Politics and the English Language": "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." Not only did you use one, your defense — other that that Christian business — is that you've used that same tired old figure of speech over and over and over again.

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed...

... and chink in the armor.

Nobody even wears armor anymore, and the word "chink" is only used — other than in its moronic racial denotation — in that dying metaphor. Here's my rule: No one should ever use the expression "chink in the armor" again. Fire everyone who lets it go out in a final draft of anything.

That said, plenty of bad writers have writing jobs, and I feel sorry for this hapless man. He's getting singled out in an extremely unpleasant way. But it would never have happened if he'd taken the trouble to write decently.

I propose we all just lighten up and not worry so much. I hereby grant any and all the freedom to describe me as a Honky, redneck, nerd, geek, etc.... When I was in Law School some drunken grad student in a dark room, apparently thinking he knew my ethnic derivation, called me a "Chonger" when he was angry with me. (I have been asked on more than one occasion if my family was partly Asian) One of the most hilarious moments in my life.

To me, this "Chink in the Armor" thing is almost as stupid as the "niggardly" controversy several years ago.

Not a defense of his defense (although at least he sounds believable, unlike the "I'm sorry if you were offended crowd") but it doesn't sound like the was "playing" the Christian card. You seem to think if someone brings it up it's something being played, when, unlike the "some of my best friends are ____" it would be something known to his co-workers at the least, and could very well be part of his not so private identity.

I used the term "cotton pickin'," as in "get your cotton pickin' hand off that pizza" for years without realizing it's SCREAMINGLY obvious racist nature. Thankfully I never used it in an awkward situation, and the person who pointed it out was very understanding (I think the size to which my eyes expanded drove home the point that I was clueless).

Swift move, playing the Christian card. I'm sure the right-wing commentators will now be super-motivated to defend this poor man.

I'm sure people will run to defend him just as much as everyone did to defend that overt, "hey look at me," Bible-carrying Bill Clinton.

If he is sincerely contrite and acting in good faith, there is an obligation to forgive, but not if he is using God as a prop. I don't see any contrition by Federico quoted here or apology or any acknowledgement of wrongdoing, only excuses.

Bretos admits that the "phrase was inappropriate," but Federico takes responsibility for nothing, not even carelessness for not thinking through all of the implications of his copy.

Since Federico does not admit that he did anything wrong, even if unintentionally (at least in this news story), there is nothing upon which to forgive.

As for right-wing commentators generally, they remember the Rush Limbaugh treatment, so they probably think that anyone who works for ESPN gets what he deserves.

When I saw that headline, I thought it was hard to believe that it was an accident, but even harder to believe that it was intentional. It would be harder yet to believe that the guy who wrote it would admit that it was intentional.

"He's getting singled out in an extremely unpleasant way. But it would never have happened if he'd taken the trouble to write decently."

True. But he was fired not "because he was a bad writer," but because he wrote something that allow some to call him a racist, without regard to whether that is true. Because that accusation is so toxic, and in all probability misplaced, the firing is ridiculous and not justified. If they wanted to fire him because he was a bad writer, they could have done so long ago.

By the way, have you read any sports writing lately? It's largely atrocious and these cliches are the rule to which there are almost no exceptions. I would guess the editor who fired him has no idea whether or not he is a bad writer.

Dr. Lewis, our Sr. (high-school) Honors English teacher, would red-line "CLICHE!!" or "TRITE"!!" over every mixed metaphor in our assignments. It's been 30+ years, and those dread red letters are seared, seared into my memory.

Agreed, lazy and hackneyed indeed, grounds for dismissal for a professional writer (as well as their editor[s]).

"To me, this 'Chink in the Armor' thing is almost as stupid as the 'niggardly' controversy several years ago."

Absolutely!

The phrase may be a cliche and thus a poor choice for a professional writer, but this wasn't why he was fired...he was fired because apparently many people today don't know the phrase and thus assumed he was using a racist term. (In the same way that the earlier hullabaloo arose because few people today know the word "niggardly.")

When one considers the implications of being fired--loss of income, loss of healthcare benefits, potential for being unemployed long-term and consequently for potentially losing his home--one has to see this as an inhumane overreaction by the cowardly morons who head ESPN.

Cliches aren't that bad. They are short hand expressions that are well understood. Most cliches are probably going to be more understandable than the "creative" and original replacements that writers are forced to create when they are not permitted to use cliches.

The only thing he did "wrong" was the sin Althouse accused him of, being a sports reporter and endlessly recycling the same tired cliches that all sports reporters recycle. But it's practically in their contracts. The rest was just bad luck.

If you want to notice something that's not there, it's easy. Just look at all the "phallic" symbols out there. But, in the words of another old cliche, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Yeah, but... He's writing for a sports website. If your standard is "no cliches" then pretty much they have to fire everybody.

You're kind of evading the point, aren't you? He was fired because he was using a racial slur, allegedly, and not because he used a cliche. If he had no racism in his heart and was simply using a commonplace cliche that would not have caused his firing if it was used against, say, LeBron James, does that still justify his firing? Not in my book.

Incidentally, "not in my book" is another cliche, which will soon be just as mystifying as "chink in his armor," once books disappear.

Uh, no. It was a term coined by Anderson Cooper, who was in effect winking to his gay friends, among whom the term is used to describe an oral sex technique. It caught on by the opponents of the Tea Party because it seemed to demean them. I've never heard it used by anyone except in mockery, derision or worse.

Ordinarily I would agree with you, but we're talking about headlines here, the last refuge of the Cliche Expert. Remember "Wall St. Lays an Egg"? "Ford to NY: Drop Dead"? A headline writer wants a familiar hook to grab the reader's eye and reel him in, and what better than a cliche for that? (Oops, there's a cliche right there!)

I have seen that repeated many times by those on the left, but I am not aware of the tea party crowd ever using the term. No doubt someone, somewhere, did. There is no question that it was generally used to be (scare quotes) "clever" when criticizing the tea party movement.

Example SentencesLight, portable and easy to lay, sticky bombs are tucked quickly under the bumper of a car or into a chink in a blast wall.

But nor have they found a chink in the armour of relativity that they could use to prise the whole thing open.

But there is one organism that seems to have found the chink in the prion's formidable armor: the lowly lichen.

Did anyone fire ths chimichanga twins, Milbank and Messina?? That was the WaPo and the 2012 Obama campaign honcho (<-- oops! a racist term!?), remember? *That* was specifically a racist jab, and not an accidental one.

You say this guy Frederico is a bad writer. (I see he is / was an editor.) Is he? What is his other writing like? One headline makes a bad writer? You write blogs and law articles. Journalism / news writing is a whole different world, and the snappy short headline has to do it.

It is interesting that the PC crowd gets him fired and the WH & its minions laugh off their jokes..

The purity is killing us.

(I do sorta like Rob's idea -- the way to get rid of it is to embrace it. Kill insulting names by overuse for everything. (Except of course the n word.) Loses its power. That's why Christians are called Christians.

The ratio of sports talk to actual sports is about 20:1. And 15 of that is cliche padding. The only thing more boring than sports talk is business babble- what you see on Bloomberg while the tickers are running across the bottom of the screen.

I don't see how it's fair to end this man's career simply for doing what everyone else does.

""teabaggers" was the term the Tea Partiers first used for themselves."

I think this is *sort of* right. I don't think that someone decided "this is our official name" but I do think that there was an extremely brief amount of time where the vast majority of people in this country thought in the terms of tea coming in bags.

We all very quickly learned better. (I knew the term only because I knew that "teabagging" was a rude animation one could do to defeated players in some first person shooters.)

I'm certain that the vast majority of folks would just as soon still believe that tea comes in bags.

None of that excuses the Beavis and Butthead sniggering of supposed media professionals or the claim that "they chose the name themselves" by our resident lefties.

I know there are some currently applicable uses for "armor" -- including the military gear cited in some comments, but the idea of having a "chink" does not apply to this armor. It's not the relevant image. But that's the nature of the "dying metaphor" problem that Orwell wrote about. You've lost touch with the image (even though you're supposedly using it for vividness). The block quote in the post continues:

"Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning withouth those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase."

This guy was not fired because he made (or inadvertently allowed) a racist statement. He was fired to protect ESPN from being labeled racist, and perhaps boycotted. He was fired because he was weak and powerless and ESPN is strong and powerful and will trample its employees if it has to.

"Asians" have not been historically discriminated against, except in California and Hawaii.

Well...no.

The period you're probably referring to, the anti-Asian panic of the early 1900s, also encompassed Washington, Oregon and Nevada.

But the big thing you're ignoring was the internment policies during WWII, which while limited in effect to the West Coast, was federal policy, thus implicating the whole nation. FDR wasn't just president of California.

By the way, who was the biggest political booster pressuring FDR to sign the order for the internment camps? None other than Gov. Earl Warren.

I believe it was thrown up online at 2:30 in the morning and taken down half an hour later. So, one, maybe?

Althouse-with-tenure is being a little glib about firing people, in my opinion.

The guy lost his dream job, and he's publicly labeled a racist?

He's probably too devastated right now, but he should think about suing. I would sue for defamation of character. His corporation is maligning him in public as a racist while the alleged victim of the remark recognizes its innocence. He can sue for wrongful termination, too, but the defamation lawsuit will win more money.

And the idea that he's being fired for being unimaginative or a bad writer is horseshit, of course. Althouse is just being snarky today.

This is like the guy at the Boston Herald who was fined for saying the "pussy" word in the newsroom (when referring to another man). He was forced to pay a fine. Now we fire people?

Lots of luck getting through the day without using any cliches. Even writers as elevated as Shakespeare used such tired phrases as "to be or not to be" and "all that glitters is not gold". Shakespeare would have been a much better writer if he hadn't used all those cliches....I would think that innocence is an affirmative defense. If he was going for the the racial slur about the improved defense against Lin, the correct phrase would have been armor against the chink, not chink in the armor. I can't believe that this was done intentionally. OK, it's a cliche, but one doesn't watch ESPN captions for the great writing. I would say that the neural shortcuts involved in cliches make them ideal for caption writing.

“Chink in the armor” has nothing to do with race. To suggest otherwise is to affirm the mindless pseudo intellectualism that has infected the left in its entirety and apparently Mrs. Althouse as well. Nothing but the complete and overwhelming defense of this man should prevail. We should never accept a world dominated by fascists, who manufacture whole reasons for subjecting us to their wretched whims.

Just one more bit of proof that racism is no longer a problem in the United States.

Good writers are not writing headlines for a sports website at 3AM. He's a hack and they got what they paid for. He admits that "he has used the phrase 'at least 100 times' in headlines over the years." Maybe he should be fired for that.

David gets closest to the mark: He was fired to protect ESPN from being labeled racist, and perhaps boycotted. He was fired because he was weak and powerless and ESPN is strong and powerful and will trample its employees if it has to.

Nice network you have there, Disney.

The guy was fired for making his company look bad. That's all there is to it. If he is truly a bad writer, then he was a bad writer before this phrase made it into print for this story. If he is blatantly racist, it is unlikely this is the first time it has come to anyone's attention at ESPN, even if this is the first time it made it into print.

And Disney (and most other large organizations) operate like this all the time. It's organizational self-preservation. It's thoughtless, but it is how it's how things are done.

Thirty years ago it was true that nobody wore armor. That changed radically with the introduction of Kevlar vests. Nowadays, plenty of cops go about in the modern version of chainmail, and the poor bloody infantry are as heavily-burdened as the Norman chevaliers of Outremer.

I know there are some currently applicable uses for "armor" -- including the military gear cited in some comments, but the idea of having a "chink" does not apply to this armor.

Tell that to the kids who have caught a bullet in the inevitable gaps in kevlar armor, or a heavier round in the spaces in between the ceramic plates inserted into the kevlar armor to provide improved protection. There's no such thing as an armor without chinks - unless your "armor" is a jointless egg of steel.

I didn't read/see the original offending story. *Why* was he using that particular metaphor? It doesn't seem appropriate to the subject of a not-particularly-tall Asian basketball player.

Telling sports writers to forgo cliches is like asking birds to stop using their wings.

Skyler, too funny. I love sports, and there are a few good sports writers out there, but by and large most are pretty bad writers and unoriginal thinkers, to boot. Wait, that sounds like most op-ed writers too...

He was fired for being the chink in ESPN's PC armor. Hur hur. Now that he's out ESPN can continue to stand in judgment of Tim Tebow and anyone else who doesn't follow the party line without any blowback from the proles about hypocrisy and double standards.

The writer says he used the phrase a lot, 100s of times, and didn't think about it in the context of Lin. I believe that. Sportwriting is a festival of cliches, occasionally deployed in a witty way, usually not. It is writing to convey a lot of information in a small amount of space and cliches are a short cut or a code. (Not racial code, ya raaacists.) It's not "creative" writing like "oh let's think deeply and write meaningfully about a flower" creative writing. This is understood by the people who read the sports page or listen to its equivalent on TV. Maybe he's a bad sports writer but it's not because he used a cliche.

And now we pause for a Teachable Moment.http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/73077.htmlAnd now you know. (Not to use the word "chink". FYI.)

This is insane. This kid Lin is phenomenal, and celebrated and compensated for being phenomenal. If his feelings were hurt by this headline, assuming he even saw it, he can soak them in a pool of liquid gold and glowing praise, maybe get a minion to issue a cutting admonition about the dangers of overreliance on cliches. Instead there's unseemly wailing, teeth gnashing, and hair rending over the mere possibility of the mere appearance of racism. It's almost like they want to emphasize racial divisions.

I object to ESPN's firing of this man for using a cliche, but I also object to the various defenses offered here, to the effect that "cliches are the lingua franca of sports writing," etc.

Anyone paid to write should always strive to rid his or her writing of cliches. While one can expect and accept the occasional slip--and one will see cliches in the prose of even the best writers--for Federico to say he had used this phrase 100 times reveals that he is a hack. Even if a phrase is not a cliche to the world at large--which "chink in the armor" certainly is--if one finds oneself using pet phrases over and over, it's time to start bringing a blue pencil to work. Federico's lack of awareness that using a phrase so often is lazy and sloppy writing tells that he is a bad writer.

If Wisconsin was as efficient as Disney they would fire Supreme Court Justices who make them look bad.

You must have never worked for them. Large segments of that company are inefficient by design. You can probably find Michael Eisner comments online somewhere explaining WHY the company is designed to be inefficient.

Can't speak to the ESPN branch, though. But based on the 37 studio analysts they bring in for every NFL pregame show, I don't think efficiency is their strong point either.

praire wind, organizations aren't about looking good at moments like that, they're about getting rid of people that make them look bad. Looking good is something only considered after millions of dollars get spent (and millions of brain cells die) creating the latest PR campaign.

Cook, you're neglecting the number one rule of writing, which is to know your audience.

If ESPN ran their network like English Lit 101, they'd be out of business by now. This guy probably knows how to write short, concise prose, including contemporary idiomatic usage and common vernacular, that works well as an accompaniment to video footage.

But hey, let's treat all writing by the same rules. No wonder we have communication problems in this country.

"Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning withouth those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase."

The problem here is just people misunderstanding metaphors and using them ignorantly.

The solution is not banning metaphors, but criticizing ignorance.

Accurate hammer & anvil metaphors shouldn't have the hammer breaking either, that's still totally wrong. Whatever is *caught* between the immense, immovable anvil and the swift, powerful hammer is what gets battered. The hammer & the anvil come out basically intact.

I would rather we challenge people to remain knowledgeable about history and etymology, and be able to understand and correctly use metaphors for outdated activities, rather than simply declare that such metaphors are bad writing because many people are too lazy to care about what they're saying.

"It's as silly to say" (writers should try to rid their work of cliches)"as to insist that a good writer, without fail, avoids adjectives, Mary Sues, and the passive voice."

While a skilled writer will know when to break rules for best effect, and will often be able to make even "bad" technique work, it remains good advice to any careful writer to avoid bad habits, which includes use of cliches, excessive adjectives, and defaulting to the passive voice.

Am I the only person in the world who frequently watches the ESPN highlight reels with the sound muted? I don't particularly root for any of the teams or players, but I like to watch spectacular plays. The background info and bad jokes of the analysts are just static anyway......I'd like to see Althouse spontaneously come up with a thousand fresh and interesting ways of describing the thousandth three pointer from the outside. And come up with a thousand new phrases the next night and the night after. The plays the thing. Description of the plays needs must be repititious and cliched.

I'm an Asian-American and I'm not particularly offended by it, apart from the fact that it's an overused cliche (the guy used it at least a hundred times?).

IMO, one of the reasons Asians have easily integrated into American society is that we don't do Sharpton-esque grievance theater. I think most of us understand pretty well that being aggressively offended does nothing in the long run. Thus you see Jeremy Lin waving it off as no big deal.

I can see why there's an uproar though: we've become conditioned to look for racist speech. Ask yourself, when's the last time you saw a writer use "dark horse" or "calling a spade a spade" in reference to a black person?

the word "chink" is only used — other than in its moronic racial denotation — in that dying metaphor

It was a chink in the great machine;

Pas exactement. The above is from page 230 of "All That I Am" the recently released novel by Anna Funder. I don't think that it is that great of a book but her previous effort, "Stasiland" was wonderful.

I fully agree with your bad writing point and use of George Orwell (a wonderful choice) to support it.

However, you appear disingenuous in claiming that was your main point. Surely you knew that a shitstorm about political correctness was to follow. It's a cheap and somewhat insulting trick. I hold you to higher standards because of my respect for you.

The poetry of sport is in the moves of the players, not the words of the analysts. And some cliches are like Homer's wine, dark seas. They establish a familiar, comfortable rhytmn to a story that's been told before. "Going, going gone" "yesssss" "Let's go to the videotape" "He's in the catbird seat, now"

The Philly Inquirer reported this story but avoided using the word "chink" in its online story.

There is a cheesesteak shop in Philly called "Chink's Steaks" which advertises quite a lot on the radio. Supposedly, its founder, a white guy, had slanted eyes and his nickname was Chink. [I do not make this stuff up].

"...some cliches are like Homer's wine, dark seas. They establish a familiar, comfortable rhytmn to a story that's been told before. 'Going, going gone' 'yesssss' 'Let's go to the videotape' 'He's in the catbird seat, now'"

Unless I am mistaken--not being one who cares about or watches or listens to sporting events--the cliches you quote above seem to be things that are said by sports announcers during broadcast of live sporting events. While spoken cliches are are also better avoided, they can take on the incantatory effect of a religious ceremony or the drama of theater. They're part of the performance, and they act as cues for the crowd's (or watcher's) reaction. They're of the moment and, as Eric Dolbhy said about music, "When you hear music, after it's over,it's gone,in the air.You can never capture it again."

In short, spoken cliches are not as egregious as written cliches, and, in fact, may serve the purpose of trying to echo or recapture that which is gone, reviving memories of those moments of elation experienced during previous sporting events. However, written cliches--being written--are not transitory, and require some minimal effort to put down. As such, they should be dispensed with, as they serve no purpose but to reveal the writer's lack of care or craft.

Several years ago, the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs held a "name the mascot" contest. The announced winning entry, "Pork Chop", was walked back several days later after two people claimed "pork chop" to be a slur on Puerto Ricans.

As others have pointed out, I wore armor when I was in Iraq and I was VERY concious of the chinks in that armor. Same with the chinks in the armor protecting my helicopters and their crews. In fact, several rounds found their way through those chinks on one of our birds.

Why does it seem to be mostly supposedly post-racial leftists who are so spastic about seeing everything and anything in terms of race and racial slurs? Wait...is slur racist somehow? Isn't there some old term that meant something negative about some other race that sounds kinda like that? I should probably be beaten for using it.